There's another bus directly behind this one

I understand that urban living occasionally requires you to flatout sprint for a bus.

The bus schedule is a quixotic thing, and if your iPod-wearing, Uggs-rocking, everything bagel-eating, cappuccino-slurping, text message sending, free morning newspaper crossword puzzling, umbrella in the snowstorm ass wants to make it to work within the on-time ballpark, you're probably going to have to accept the twice a month ridiculousness of lunging through traffic after a giant rolling billboard. That's fine.

My problem is when people catch up to the bus earlier than expected and then try to play it cool. Both shoelaces are undone, they look like an extra in Twister, and now they're pretending they've been impatiently waiting for the bus for half an hour. We all saw you running alongside us two seconds ago, fake Burberry scarf flying in the wind, electronics bouncing around like cans behind a wedding limo, breathing like Darth Vader. You're not fooling anyone.

But there he is, giving the driver a pound, taking the only empty seat, winking at the girl with the beat-up novel. Try not to sweat on me player.

Not a morning person

You know it's early when you get yourself a huge cup of coffee, rip open two packets of Splenda and then stand over the garbage can and slowly pour the fake sugar into the trash.

Done and done

So you're watching American Idol last night (you were watching, don't front) and trying to figure out who the precociously talented contestant Allison looks like. Thankfully, my sole talent in life is figuring these kinds of things out.


Kelly Clarkson meets Brittany Murphy. Am I right or right? I'm a genius, I know.

American Idol went "to Detroit" (for a solid fifteen seconds of footage) to showcase the Motown sound (and a few dozen fans.) They checked out the studio where most of the great music was made and took in a couple of corners of the museum. Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson were there, looking good, enjoying the limelight.

My eternal complaint: I know he's a musical genius and all (as important to pop music as I am to the craft of figuring out who people look like) but can't we just have a VH1 bubble pop up every time Berry Gordy talks about the glory days of Motown and note: "Thanks for bailing after the '68 riots and moving the label to Los Angeles in '72---Love, Detroit." It's like if all the Indian movie producers decided to move to LA and then still put out "Bollywood" movies. At least symbolically, you're cutting yourself off from what made the art possible in the first place. The magic was not just about Berry Gordy.

Some music transcends time and space (no really cares about the context of the Beatles as a Liverpudlian band) but Motown music rose out of a certain experience and ambition of the black community in Detroit, a place that promised in the post-World War II era to bring (though ultimately failed to fulfill) a new social equality based on prosperity for all.

Caveats: I'm as white as Clay Aiken and way too young to have been there. I also realize that Gordy is a record producer, not a political figure. Still, I think it would have been amazing to see what kind of songs Motown Records could have produced if they had stayed in Detroit and confronted in a more concrete way the challenges of post-Dr. King/post-Malcolm X rapidly deindustrializing black America. Anyone who's suffered through a Michigan winter can empathize with the decision, but I'll always wonder what could have been.

You know you're fat when...

I just bit my tongue so hard that I drew blood. How is that possible for someone without Avril Lavigne-like fangs?

They're on to me

I know google's ads are scientifically targeted via page content to promote maximum buying of stuff. Which is great, as long as we get our 0.0005 cents per click or whatever. But where does this come from?

Sinead O'Connor

Order 'Live at the Sugar Club' CD/DVD Photos & Interviews

www.sineadoconnor.com

I mean, dk is a female, and I'm bald, but I don't think anything we've written here is explicitly pro-Sinead, great artist though she is. Though all of the ads for get-rich schemes are eerily correlated with our hearts' desires.

The people are moving at me!

I was going down to the subway yesterday and a guy jumped onto the escalator and then came flying backwards, did a Barry Sanders-like spin move, and got onto the one right next to it and went down into the bowels of the station.

How is it possible to get onto the wrong escalator? Under what scenario does this happen to a human being?

Not to get all personal, but this is my usual response to the presence of an escalator: 1. walk up to it. 2. see which direction the stairs are moving. 3. if the stairs are moving in the direction I want to go, proceed cautiously onto escalator. 4. enjoy the ease and comfort of the moving stairs.

Reasonable enough, right? So what could have happened here?

1. The guy was blind. Or maybe he suffered from rare but dangerous motion-blindness, and isn't capable of sensing the direction of moving stairs. If either one of these are the case, he should, by default, get on the escalator to the right of the other escalator.
2. He had never seen an escalator before. Maybe this was his first experience with one. Evidence for: he jumped backwards off the thing like it had bit him. Evidence against: how quickly he got onto the opposite escalator.
3. He was indeed Barry Sanders and he was just showing off for the subway crowd. Evidence for: truly exceptional spin move. Evidence against: he was white and tall and Barry Sanders never showed off.

Driving to the old country

DK, it's funny you mention this, I had the same conversation last night:

If you're passing on anything with wheels...you pass on the left, always. Just like a car. Pretend you're a car. When do you ever see a car that looks fucking normal passing on the right? Exactly.

So, in countries where you drive on the left, do you walk on the left side of the sidewalk and pass on the right? I have no idea. Is it a hemisphere-specific thing?

The only non-U.S. country I've ever been to was Canada, which is kind of like America meets 17th century Britain with better (but fewer) teeth.

I paid $17.50, I deserve speed, right?

I just got off the second train, which I had boarded mere moments after getting off the first train, the train that stops two blocks from my apartment. I'm now on a bus, sitting here, kicking it, looking warm, absorbing electricity from a jack in the back of the hungover sunglassed girl's carpeted captain's chair into my lap. My body is on the bus with the slowest wi-fi in the history of wi-fi enabled buses (a six month history that fourteen Harvard students are writing their Ph.D. dissertations on---they're scheduling a conference entitled "An Interdisciplinary Look at Social Mobility in the Wired Autotransport post-Adolescent Low Leisure Class.")

Once the bus decides to leave here (another bus has mechanical problems so we're waiting to cram their passengers on here) we will ride from Boston to New York, from Puritanland to Dutchland, from the nation's smart city to the nation's money city. It's like going from one century to the next, the varnish being stripped away by the acidic and purifying hands of progress. Manhattan may be all Grey Poupon and shine and designer shoelaces now but you can still feel the power and energy and "life" oozing from the sidewalks, feel it even when you can't see it. This is where America happens. This is the capitol of the human universe. You know how when you're broke as a joke and you come to the richest person you know with your ass in your hand and you say, "I need help"? Usually you don't then get to make demands on what you're going to do with the money. Gimme the money in pennies so I can make wishes at the fountain. Obama lives in Washington but America lives in New York.

The present: middle aged lady just got on the bus, set her stuff down on a seat in the front, went down to the back of the bus (where I'm sitting) and looked at every person. The driver said, "Do you need help finding a seat?" She said, no, I'm just seeing who's on the bus. Then she spies a vaguely exotic looking woman, points at her and says to the driver, "Check that woman's ID." Why? Just do it, make sure it matches the ticket. "I saw a woman, looked just like her once." And? It scared her? Made the blood run into her frozen brain? The driver lets Foxnews return to her seat and smiles back at us, us enlightened.

(How come no crazy person ever picks me out as the lawbreaker? Why am I never judged unfairly? I'm rocking: Detroit hat, blue blazer, bright orange t-shirt and I'm getting the benefit of the doubt over here.)

Here we are, here we are, paying tolls. Hopefully in about four hours I'll step into the capitol of world capital and figure out how to get on the number one train uptown. Get off at 103rd, walk to 106th, try to pretend I look New York enough to be a Columbia student. Who knows what wonders this big ass backpack could hold? Wait for the M60 bus, take it forever, stay on after the college kids get off, stay on after the PS kids get off, stay on until Harlem bleeds into Queens, then residential residential Queens bleeds into airindustrial Queens.

Before midnight, barring mechanical failure or subway collapse or highway robbery or Foxnews flipping out at the reststop and taking fascist control of the state of Connecticut, I should be in Detroit. Detroit, the ex-world champion, she never learned to keep her hands up and eventually someone punches harder.

Tomorrow, my uncle will be in a casket and we'll all show up in American cars. He was as wonderful over the last few months as ever, questioning everything, maybe America is too big and too complex for its old structures, maybe we should reorganize the state governments into larger, semi-autonomous regions. Maybe we need to let the old shells fall away. He hadn't figured it out yet, but he held the idea in his head and played with it. He felt the tension between the old city falling away, and the new one bearing down, felt that uncertainty in his bones, looked forward.